What do the results of animal studies mean for humans?

Studies involving lab rats, mice, and other animals are usually one of the earliest tests of a new drug or medical treatment.

While such studies can sound very exciting — especially if you or someone in your family is affected by the condition or disease being considered — they're preliminary. They don't indicate that a cure is right around the corner. In fact, typically it's still years away.

So when you read about a health study involving animals, be skeptical of the results. You're hearing about a very early step toward a treatment, not the final word.

What usually happens first is that researchers test a new medical intervention on human cells or tissues in the lab (often called test-tube research). If things go well, the next step is to test on animals.

There's a great deal of controversy about animal testing, and I won't describe that in detail here. But most researchers believe it's safer and more ethical to test a new drug on an animal than on a human being. It's important to test on living creatures, because things work differently in biological beings than they do in test tubes.

If animal tests show that the medical intervention has merit, researchers may decide to test it on people. This is where we can finally begin to get interested.

Human experiments have to be done very carefully and take a long time. The more people involved in the test, the better — ideally there'd be thousands of participants, or at least hundreds. This helps to ensure that the results are accurate and useful.

And the longer the study runs (five or ten years, for example, or even more), the more confident the researchers can be about whether the intervention really works and is safe.

In other words, even when an animal study shows some interesting results, we as consumers need to be wary. Not only is a potential cure for humans likely to be many years away, it's entirely possible that a drug that shows promise in animals won't work the same way in people.

For instance, mice don't get certain tumors that people do. So a mouse might not develop a cancerous tumor as a side effect of a certain drug, but a human being might. An animal study simply can't uncover that kind of information.

Animal studies do give us reason for hope, but we need to remember to take them with a grain of salt. Even if the intervention is eventually found to work in humans, it often takes a decade or longer for researchers to study, test, prove, and announce their good news.

This Internet site provides information of a general nature and is designed for educational purposes only. If you have any concerns about your own health or the health of your child, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Please review the Terms of Use before using this site. Your use of the site indicates your agreement to be bound by the Terms of Use.

This site is published by BabyCenter, L.L.C., which is responsible for its contents as further described and qualified in the Terms of Use.